The Handbook of Communication History Communication Research

This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 02 Oct 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Handbook of Communication History Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig, John P. Jackson, Jr. Communication Research Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203149119.ch3 Jefferson D. Pooley, David W. Park Published online on: 10 Dec 2012 How to cite :- Jefferson D. Pooley, David W. Park. 10 Dec 2012, Communication Research from: The Handbook of Communication History Routledge Accessed on: 02 Oct 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203149119.ch3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 Communication Research Jefferson D. Pooley and David W. Park Communication research is, and has been, unwieldy and balkanized. The same is true of historical accounts of the fi eld’s development. In this sense at least, the historiography of communication research resembles its object of study. Consider a few of the fi eld’s notable axes of difference: national traditions, methodological loyalties, long-running skills-or-scholarship dis- putes, mixed disciplinary roots, subfi eld chauvinisms, and North-South disparities. Each of these points of tension—or mutual indifference—is echoed by the published literature on the history of communication research. One irony is that the historiographical literature, as a result, fails to register the fi eld’s cacophonic disorder—except by example. This chapter, an analysis of published, English-language works on the fi eld’s history, maps a surprisingly vast literature. For all the bibliographic abundance, we conclude that the fi eld’s historiography is fragmentary and lopsided. For example, historians have lavished Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research with attention, but have ignored the global South. We call out the patterned neglect as one fault among others that, taken together, undercuts the appearance of health in abundance. The fi eld’s history deserves more and better. In fact, communication scholars routinely in- voke its past in a thousand small ways, mostly outside the work that this chapter surveys: in the syllabi of graduate pro-seminars and undergraduate survey courses, in journal articles’ brief salutes to theories past, in the panoramic fi rst chapters of textbooks. Very often we appeal to the bundle of mnemonic hand-me-downs that comprise the received history of the fi eld. Once some nineteenth-century century preliminaries are acknowledged, that received history begins with the study of propaganda in the interwar United States, said to cling to a “hypo- dermic needle” or “magic bullet” theory of direct media infl uence which gave way, during and after World War II, to a more nuanced, methodologically sophisticated understanding of “limited effects.” This story was narrated most infl uentially by Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld in the opening pages of Personal Infl uence(1955). The other main strand of the received history was recounted by the American fi eld’s energetic booster, Wilbur Schramm (e.g., 1963), who anointed a quartet of prominent social scientists—Kurt Lewin, Carl Hovland, Harold Lasswell, and Lazarsfeld—as the would-be discipline’s “four founders.” Schramm would go on to publish numerous retell- ings of the “four founders” account, and the story found its way into countless survey textbooks. When merged, the Lazarsfeld and Schramm histories describe a young (American) fi eld matur- ing through professionalization and methodological precision. Despite some recent revisionist work, this account—a kind of social science bildungsroman—remains fi rmly lodged in the fi eld’s memory of itself (Pooley 2008). 76 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 05:18 02 Oct 2021; For: 9780203149119, chapter3, 10.4324/9780203149119.ch3 COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 77 Trust in inherited shorthands is common in other disciplines too. What is unusual is that, in communication research, we do not have a robust check on the recycling of these origin myths and the like. Instead, work centered on the fi eld’s history has tended to fortify those myths. Storytelling, in other words, has been drafted to hold the whole thing—the madcap fi eld—together. The problem with this kind of history is its goal: to bring order to chaos. Instead we should strive to make the chaos plain. Just because glass shards are scattered about does not mean that there was ever an intact window. To catalogue the shards is to direct our attention to the fi eld’s complex and uneven development around the world. “Communication research” has been a department-by-department achievement, won with the aid—and sometime hindrance—of war- time governments, concerned publics, nervous academics, ambitious universities, and needy businesses. It is a hard set of stories to tell, given its sheer complexity, but worth the exertion. For one thing, our particularly rich case could help illuminate some of the broader dynamics of academic life. The other payoff is a service to the fi eld, to invite a self-scrutiny that our published histories have instead defl ected. This chapter documents what we have so far: over 1,600 published works in English alone, clustered around particular topics, methods, and geographies. In order to make sense of that tall stack of scholarship, we gathered the citations into a bibliography, then assigned digital tags to each entry according to its relevant attributes. We deployed the tags to record, when relevant, (1) historiographical approach (e.g., “biographical” or “institutional”); (2) geography (e.g., “Can- ada” or “Venezuela”); (3) disciplinary frame of reference, or orientation to a fi eld-within-the- fi eld (e.g., “sociology” or “rhetoric”); (4) substantive topic, subfi eld, or fi gure (e.g., “audience research” or “McLuhan”); (5) institutional location (e.g., “Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies” or “Columbia”); and (6) the historical or geopolitical context (e.g., “1920s” or “Cold War”). The number of tags assigned to any single publication varied, according to its relevant attributes; some entries were tagged ten or more times, and others just once.1 We faced an early dilemma: what to count as work on the fi eld’s history. There are, after all, no recognized borders around the fi eld itself. The would-be discipline’s scope, moreover, is the main issue at stake in any number of historical accounts. Even worse, a map drawn by a scholar of “fi lm and media studies” may have nothing in common with the territory surveyed by, say, a “speech communication” researcher—except, ironically, claims for catholicity. Even the nomen- clature is up for grabs. Our solution was to erect a very big tent. For inclusion, a published work had to present itself as history, and then meet one of two criteria: (1) to self-describe its subject as “communication” research (an emic indicator) and/or (2) address research that we judged to be centered on medi- ated or face-to-face communication (an etic designation). There is, for example, an enormous body of history on the “Chicago School” of sociology. We included only those works that refer to the Chicago sociologists as communication scholars, or histories that plainly address Chicago work on media-related topics. We faced a series of judgment calls in the tagging process too. To apply tags, we consulted abstracts, tables-of-contents, and—when necessary—full text. A mere mention of, say, a topic, name, or country would not merit a tag; the treatment needed to be more substantial than that. To earn the tag “Néstor García-Canclini,” for example, an article needed to reference the Argentinian scholar in the title, or else grant him signifi cant billing in the article abstract. The advantage of tagging is its fl exibility. Tags are non-exclusive, so that an article might claim, for instance, both the “international communication” and “media effects” tags—when a more rigid classifi cation might require a choice. Another benefi t of tags is that they spotlight serendipitous affi nities: of the fi fty-three entries tagged “journalism education,” for example, Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 05:18 02 Oct 2021; For: 9780203149119, chapter3, 10.4324/9780203149119.ch3 78 JEFFERSON D. POOLEY AND DAVID W. PARK thirty-nine are also tagged “United States”—which speaks to the imbalance of the historiography, the centrality of journalism education to the American fi eld, or both. We used the tagged bibliography as a supplement to the traditional survey approach, in which a small subset of relevant works merits brief discussion. The bibliography supplied a big- picture sweep which, in turn, informed our treatment of specifi c articles and books. The result is a mix of close reading and taxonomic breadth. Despite its inclusive design, our tagged bibliography has a number of weaknesses. The most notable is its restriction to works published in English. We also certainly missed many publica- tions. Our aims to be exhaustive were, of course, doomed from the start; the bibliography is large, but cannot be considered complete.

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